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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26571808">Screaming Silence of the Ache</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/treefrogie84/pseuds/treefrogie84'>treefrogie84</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Old Guard Bingo [8]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Aftermath, Booker | Sebastien le Livre Needs Therapy, Depression, Gen, Minor Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Minor Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 11:01:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,135</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26571808</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/treefrogie84/pseuds/treefrogie84</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Joe lets Nicky lead them up the stairs. He knows any attack is more likely to come from that direction, but all the same, he’s unwilling to leave Booker at their backs. Booker is a broken man and broken men do desperate things out of madness and grief.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Minor or Background Relationship(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Old Guard Bingo [8]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1901185</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>The Old Guard Bingo</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Screaming Silence of the Ache</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Unbeta'd, we die like immortals</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Joe lets Nicky lead them up the stairs. He knows any attack is more likely to come from that direction, but all the same, he’s unwilling to leave Booker at their backs. Booker is a broken man and broken men do desperate things out of madness and grief.</p>
<p>He’s already braced for the hit when Booker regains his voice, lashing out in Russian and then French. Andy’s shoulders tighten as the words penetrate, but she lets it go, following Nicky up the stairs.</p>
<p>There’s no way Nile understood him— she’s refreshingly open with her language abilities— but tone carries and her fist clenches. Joe carefully touches her shoulder, reminding her that he’s here, she’s not alone. He can’t see Nicky to know if he heard, but he assumes he has.</p>
<p>It’s just words, nothing he needs to react to beyond a stiffer back.</p>
<p>Booker keeps hurling abuse, but they’re up the stairs and to the street, filing into their nondescript sedan and heading directly to the coast.</p>
<p>Hours pass, and they’re across the channel and heading north along the coast. They take turns driving, mostly silent.</p>
<p>Joe catches Nile opening her mouth like she wants to say something a few times, but she always closes it again without saying a word.</p>
<p>“Ask,” he instructs quietly from the front passenger seat. “We’ve heard it all before.”</p>
<p>Nile frowns, staring out her window. “What now?” She sounds so young. She’s not a child, Joe knows that, but she seems impossibly child-like, lost and confused and asking for guidance.</p>
<p>“Now we start figuring out how to integrate you into the team. What your strengths are, where they overlap with ours.” Andy sighs from the driver’s seat. “We’ll need to stay underground for a while, at least a few weeks, while things calm down and Copley can deal with the fallout. Then, we’ll start moving. Taking jobs that seem right.”</p>
<p>Andy doesn’t sound like she’s in good shape either.</p>
<p>“You sure, Boss? We can—“</p>
<p>“I’m not quitting just because I might die,” Andy cuts him off, changing lanes and gunning the engine. “We’ve always known that anytime might be our time. Forewarning doesn’t change anything.”</p>
<p>Nicky meets Joe’s eyes in the mirror, tilting his head ever so slightly, willing to jump in if warranted, but leaving it to Joe’s discretion. Joe shakes his head minutely. It’s not worth incurring Andy’s irritation yet.</p>
<p>Nile shifts uncomfortably, a reminder that they’ve been silent for too long. “If you say so. You call the shots.”</p>
<p>Joe stays silent, wondering if Copley can be trusted. Finding Quynh, always in the back of his mind, and forced to the forefront every time Booker, or now Nile, has another nightmare and he watches them drown on dry land, just gained a new level of urgency. Pushed there by the limited time they have left.</p>
<p>He won’t let Andy die without seeing Quynh again. They’ve already lost two members of their tiny family through negligence, he can’t… he can’t stomach the idea of Andy going to her final rest without seeing her beloved.</p>
<p>If it takes years… He shudders, Merrick’s voice echoing in his head, and looks back at Nicky. Whole and within arm’s reach.</p>
<p>Joe forces himself to keep breathing steadily, ignoring everything that tries to push its way into his worries. He’s okay, Nicky’s okay, even Andy is okay, just slightly mortal. There’s no cause for panic, not now.</p>
<p>(Except it’s not that easy, and after nine hundred years of this, he knows it. Knows he and Nicky will alternate between nightmares and barely dozing for weeks, waiting for their subconscious to figure out that nothing has changed. They’ve never worried about waking the others, now he’s wondering if he should. Wondering if this is what Andy feels like all the time.)</p>
<p>Andy keeps driving, pushing herself to her limits, heading north until she can’t and then east, finally stopping four cars and half a dozen countries later around dawn. No one says anything, the car still silent except for the road noise and someone stretching slightly in their seat.</p>
<p>Tossing the keys to Nicky, she orders, “Get us to the epsilon safe house. There’s space there.”</p>
<p>She’s asleep within five minutes of getting back on the road, head dropping towards the back window and fingers twitching in her lap.</p>
<p>Joe’s hand creeps across the gap between the front seats, tucks in next to Nicky’s thigh and hidden for the most part. Nile makes a face in the mirror when she catches him looking but doesn’t say anything. Not an unkind face, so he doesn’t know what it means either. He can’t read her yet, that sort of thing only comes with time.</p>
<p>None of them say anything. It’s like Booker and Merrick stole all their words, leaving them bound in silence. He can only hope it’s not forever. That their words will come back after they’ve gotten some sleep and rest.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Booker watches them leave, leaving him in the dirt and mud of the Thames. Leaving him like they always do. Forcing him to be alone, like he hasn’t spent the last two hundred years wishing for anything else.</p>
<p>He’s cruel in his disappointment, knows it’s just cementing his sentence, but doesn’t know how to stop either, until they’re long gone, melted back into London’s teaming populace.</p>
<p>And he’s truly alone.</p>
<p>He spends a few days drinking before remembering that London has the most cameras per capita than anywhere else in the world. Then he slips onboard a train heading for the continent, for <em>home</em>, and tries to avoid thinking about how many more days he has to go. (Three thousand, three hundred and forty-nine)</p>
<p>He hates Paris, always has. The revolutionary fervor of his youth has led to nothing but disappointment and death, and Booker swears he can still smell the rotting flesh of the aristos on summer days.</p>
<p>But he’s kept his own apartment here anyway since World War II, when they needed a place to stay while working with the resistance, and well… it’s here or the North Pole and he’s already frozen to death far more times than he should.</p>
<p>He hates Paris and Paris hates him, but the alcohol is plentiful and cheap, his tiny apartment overlooking nothing and even cheaper.</p>
<p>Maybe if he spends enough time here, it will seem like home.</p>
<p>Or maybe, being so close but so far from his family’s graves will slowly drive him mad, until he has no choice but to descend into the crypts. He thinks it might happen anyway.</p>
<p>He dreams, when he’s not drowning, of endless corridors of bones, surrounding himself with the death he wants so desperately. He won’t last a hundred years up here, not when the crypts and caves are so close.</p>
<p>He’s just so <em>tired</em>.</p>
<p> </p>
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